Of Hate and Sorrow
by Claire Michelle
Summary: My name is Clara Oswald. I am the Impossible Girl. I jumped into a raw time stream to save the Doctor. This is my story of the the Last Great Time War.
1. Chapter 1

The name's Oswin. Or Clara. Whichever you prefer, really. I've been called so many names, it really doesn't matter. Others call me Clara. At this point, that is. I probably should have picked a better name. That's the funny thing about Time Lords—they have all these silly titles.

Not that I'm a Time Lord. No, I'm very much human. Here on Gallifrey they think of me as one of them. Not a Time Lord—I didn't look into the untempered schism at brilliant age of eight—but as a Gallifreyan living within the Capitol. That's the beauty of a perception filter. I built it out of an old vortex manipulator. Lets me stay here without everyone wondering how a human got here. Long story, really. Can't exactly say I jumped into a raw time stream.

The Doctor's different now. So much younger. He's still got quite a few centuries on me, but when I had first met him he said he was over a thousand years old. It feels like I've been doing this a thousand years. Blimey, I might have. I don't really know where I am in my journey through his timeline. I've seen so many of his adventures. I don't really know when it'll end. Right now…

I came into the middle of the Time War. I'd read about it in the TARDIS. So much hatred. The Doctor had fought on the front lines, for a while. I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. But I had to go. This wasn't the time for an existential crisis.

When I first got to the front line, it was- I don't know how to put it. There was so much. So much pain and suffering. So much death. And I knew that the Doctor had been a soldier. I knew he was powerful and great. But this man—he was a warrior. And that frightened me. It wasn't as if he was a different person. That's what made it harder. It was still the Doctor. I could see him inside that warrior. To see my friend—the kindest man in all of Time—the cause of so many deaths… It's one of those things you don't let yourself think of, because if you did, you wouldn't know what to think. And yet you fear the outcome anyway, 'cause you know no good would come of it.

I tried to ignore what he was doing, for the most part. At first it was great. After the Dalek Asylum, I was glad to have a chance at revenge on those bastards. The Doctor wouldn't like that. _My _Doctor wouldn't like it, that is. This Doctor did what had to be done. He was very practical. I suppose I admired him for that, if only to find one cause for it. After a while, the lust for revenge faded away. Vindictive turned to indifferent. Indifferent turned to sorrow. I didn't want the war to continue. I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to be a soldier. I wasn't even sure why we were at war. But I couldn't leave. I had to stay to help the Doctor.

He was on his eighth incarnation at this point in his timeline. It was hard at first but after so many run-ins with him, it started to get easier to remember his faces in chronological order.

What I knew was that Lord President Rassilon was heading the army of millions. The Doctor also had great command and respect, but he didn't always use it. There was some sort of "ultimate plan" that the High Council had agreed upon. Word around the hydrogen cloud was that the Doctor was against it. Apparently he'd been avoiding Rassilon. Most didn't know what the plan was. But if the Doctor didn't like it, it had to have been bad.

It was hard to earn my way into the war. Not everyone was allowed to fight—the Time Lords, of course, and very few ordinary Gallifreyans who had allied themselves with the High Council. I had to go through difficult trials and tests to see if I was "worthy" of fighting at the side of the Time Lords—and I _may_ have stolen a spaceship. Just a small one from the Chancellory Guard. I needed to help the Doctor.


	2. Chapter 2

Lately I'd been following him. He hadn't really thought much of it—at least, hadn't done anything to suggest so. Many of the low-ranking soldiers followed him. One more didn't make a difference. Especially when his mind was busy with other things.

He had left for a few hours. He was summoned to speak with the High Council. I thought he'd return shortly, but eventually I had to return to base. Being human, I tired more easily than the others. At base I could store my ship safely and rest. On my way to the bunkers, I saw the Doctor sitting outside the TARDIS, leaning against the wood. His head rested on his hand, fisted in his hair as though he'd been pulling it in deep thought.

"Everything alright?" I asked from the doorway. I tried to keep my distance, still pretending to be a stranger. He looked, pulled out of whatever he had been thinking by the soldier in front of him.

He shifted and wrung his hands before nodding. Yet his brows remained knit together, a crease on his forehead and a frown etched onto his face. His eyes focused on the ground near my feet, as if it displayed the memories that clearly troubled him. His lips moved with only the slightest visibility, likely biting and gnawing at the insides of his mouth.

I'd seen the Doctor this way many times before. He looked like this when plagued with the inevitability of an outcome he didn't like. The Doctor would often ignore things he didn't like, preferring to run away from the problem as though an adventurous distraction would make it disappear. We all have our ways of coping. The Doctor's was running.

But the Doctor couldn't run away from a war. Not when his entire species was at risk. Not when his family was in danger. So he stayed. He fought. And he tried to run away in the only way he could—by not thinking about it. Now the not thinking about it had caught up with him. This was the point when he had to make a choice.

So I did what the Doctor's friend could do. I walked over to the wooden box and sat beside him. He seemed a bit confused, of course, but I knew he needed someone. If only to hear his thoughts.

I waited a moment, for him to say something. If I tried to force him into speaking, he'd never say anything. He sat for a while, staring at the ground. His face remained worn and aged, but it had almost gone slack—the face of one who has thought too much, so simply stops. When he did speak, the breaking of silence surprised me.

"I don't know what to do," he admitted. His head shook slightly.

"That's a first," I mumbled, earning a small, upwards twitch at the corner of the Doctor's mouth. The echo of a smile stayed for only a moment before fading into that engraved frown.

The Doctor sighed, whatever silent resolve he had dissipating. "The Council…" he began, rubbing his brow with one hand. He grimaced. "I shouldn't be telling you this."

That stung a bit. I mean, I understood his hesitation, of course. But he was still my best mate.

I breathed a small laugh. "I won't tell anyone," I promised. "Besides, it's not like I can really go back anyway." He looked up with a hint of confusion. A pleasant exchange from the grimace. "I stole a ship." Alright, I probably shouldn't have told him that. But it's not like he would turn me in to the Council. He knew I wasn't the only one breaking the rules.

A strange sound came from his mouth. Was it a laugh? "You stole a spaceship?" he repeated. I gave a small nod. "You _stole_ a _spaceship_?" He broke into laughter now, his body shaking with the humour of the situation. I couldn't help but join him. It was strange, our laughter. To this day I have no idea why we found it so funny. Maybe a human, under the guise of a Gallifreyan, stealing a ship from the Chancellery Guard of Gallifrey really was hilarious.

Whatever the reason was, we needed it. Species aside, we were both soldiers in the middle of battle. I suppose it was hysterics, but neither of us would admit it.

Eventually the laughter died down and he returned to a slack face. The humour had left and the severity of the situation returned to us.

"The…Ultimate Sanction—what they're planning," the Doctor began. "They want to kill everyone."

"Isn't that what war does?"

"No, not—" The Doctor sighed again. I could tell that he was pained by the Council's plan. "They want to destroy everything—sacrifice all of time, sacrifice everything, even Gallifrey."

That was _not_ in the book.

"That's suicidal! How can they do that?" High Council. Stupid question. "Doctor, you have to stop them."

"Someone on the Council opposed Rassilon and he killed her," he explained. "They're doing this with or without approval. They think it'll raise them to a new level of consciousness."

"They're mad." How could that even make sense? "You're Time Lords! You're supposed to be smart—what they hell are they thinking?"

"They've been corrupted by power." His voice was soft, not of anger, but of mourning. He mourned for the loss of his people—his people as he knew them.

After fighting the war for so long, I had forgotten how much it must have affected the Doctor. Pretending to be a soldier had made me think more collectively, about Gallifrey as a whole. I spent a lot of time here, yes. But this was the Doctor's _home_. What would it be like if this happened to Earth?

"I'm sorry," I whispered. I don't know when or why we had started whispering, but normal volumes seemed too much in the silence of night.

He nodded and bit his lip. He wasn't crying—this Doctor would never cry in front of me. But there was so much sorrow behind those eyes. He had given up on any happy ending long ago. Now there was only resignation.

"There has to be some way to stop them." How had he done it? I knew everything was destroyed, and the Doctor spoke of burning, but _how_? And why had this begun anyway?

"It's odd how much Rassilon has changed," I mused. He had once been the Doctor's friend—a good man.

The Doctor's head snapped up. "What did you say?"

I furrowed my brow before repeating myself. "It's odd how Rassilon has changed."

"That's it!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet.

"I'm sorry—what?" The bloody hell is he going on about?

"The Rod of Rassilon!"

More confusion from me.

"The Great Key—it can be used on the De-Mat gun," he explained. "That's what they want to use to destroy time. If I get the key I can make the gun remove masses from time and stop the Council."

He rushed to unlock the TARDIS and open the door. He left the door open and I began to follow before he quickly returned. "Stay put," he ordered, and shut the door. The TARDIS soon began to dematerialize.

To hell with that.


End file.
